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It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age' the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.

Simone de Beauvoir

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Simone de Beauvoir
Age: 78 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 9
Died: 1986
Died: April 14
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Political Philosopher
Paris
France
Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Castor
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Humans
Child
Behaving
Children
Age
Families
Men
Chance
Extraordinary
Like
Lying
Mere
Speak
Lies
Makes
Beings
Also
Longer
Human
Either

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.
Simone de Beauvoir
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To be moral is to discover fundamentally ones own being.
Simone de Beauvoir
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That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
Simone de Beauvoir
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There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.
Simone de Beauvoir
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One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, I will always be here.
Simone de Beauvoir
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A man is in the right in being a man it is the woman who is in the wrong.
Simone de Beauvoir
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One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.
Simone de Beauvoir
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If you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
Simone de Beauvoir
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She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.
Simone de Beauvoir
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If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
Simone de Beauvoir
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I like everyone who tries to show that madness is, in large part, conditioned by society and particularly by the family, and therefore, strongly affects women.
Simone de Beauvoir
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At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
Simone de Beauvoir
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La femme?sait que quand on la regarde on ne la distingue pas de son apparence: elle est juge e, respecte e, de sire e a' travers sa toilette. Woman?knows that when she is looked at she is not considered apart from her appearance: she is judged, respected, desired, by and through her toilette.
Simone de Beauvoir